I need to do the laundry today.

From the metro.

Où voulez-vous aller?

Paris!

婆婆回娘家。

Overdued on Vietnam (1)

There was no longer a conscious effort at some point to document the trip through my camera lens. I'd worry if there wasn’t enough light, or my composition was crap. I guess that’s why this post is kinda overdue, many of the photos turned out to be pretty uninspired. And I was lazy. I just wanted to soak up the sun, smile and smoke.



Let’s start with Ha Long Bay. One of my favourite part of the trip, and one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to so far. We spent two days on one of those touristic junk boats with a few other travellers. Sadly, Ha Long Bay have been laden with such heavy touristic burden that I believe some of its natural charm were spoiled. But it was still breathtaking.

The weather was just gorgeous. We got to see Ha Long Bay in its multiple facades; against the clear blue sky, the amazing sunset, the magical hour and the misty, magnificently mysterious morning when it rained the next day.









It was beautiful.

Rosebud-stained page. 01-06-08, Saigon.

Let us move on.
Now that the ache has subsided
Into an almost non-
existential jolt that still awakens me
every moment when the nights become
still.

Let us not know,
If that dwelling, sinking, fading, menacing
still grip tight.

The world I see now
feels a hue from an auburn
and the day will move along into a blue.
By then we will know the truth to the whys.

The great affair is to move.

Good morning, Vietnam.

Vietnam's been amazing.
Time away from home is exactly what I need right now. I don't want to go back.

Away,

"I think at certain points in life we all need to get out.
Pilgrimage. To get out of home, and to be far away from the familiar. When we are too familiar, we become stale with boredom. And to be unfamiliar with a world that's new and perhaps strange, we discover a whole different part of ourselves we never knew."

I found this line on the first page on my travelling moleskine.

Wishful thinking makes the days go by.

If there was anything I learnt about myself during this trip; 1) besides being surprisingly uptight and I guess one of us has to be either, 2) learning that those map-reading, orientating years in Boy Scouts were utterly useless when it comes to honing my navigation skills, 3) intuition is actually useful and 4) that I was not as upfront with strangers as I like to think I am with directions - 5) I've also found absolute joy in having people as my photo subjects.



Perhaps one of the greatest joy of travelling isn't just eating, drinking and be merry. It is also about the people you meet along the way.

'You love next time no problem!'

So far - Ayutthaya's amazing ruins and wats, Lopbhuri's monkeys, enduring a 9 hour farangs-infested tour bus ride to Chiang Mai and all the fantastic food and massages. Lychee and shaved ice are indeed the best invention when sitting through a slow 36 degree celcius afternoon. The people here are amazing as well.

Tomorrow - a tribal trip (nope, not the Karen tribe - I will never.), perhaps another wat and chats with monks. I think I am in love with Chiang Mai. The weekend will be a two days trip down the Mekong River to Luang Prabang in Laos (We chickened out on the 6 hour rocket boat ride. Some day.) Then Vientiene and back to Thailand down to the kohs.

And then it's Bangkok. I cannot overspend. But with all the food and everything, I just might.

*Photos uploaded so far. (Oh yes, did I mention I just bought my Canon D400? My first DSLR! It's fun to experiment.)

I ♥ HK.

It's been raining in Singapore for three days now. So I felt compelled to show a photo I took when it was raining in Hong Kong as well. Perhaps it was the years of watching TVB dramas, but I couldn't help but felt the strange sense of familiarity when I stepped foot onto Hong Kong, like I was a native.

But darn those formulating years of having to watch dubbed Hong Kong dramas, perhaps now my Cantonese would have been decent enough. I hated having to turn around at some salesperson going on in their native tongue and then in my faltering Mandarin mentioned my incapacity to speak any of it.

The colourful dialect aside, I found myself inspired by the messy nucleated metropolis that is Hong Kong. The tall buildings crammed so close to each other, the dull, washed-away facade of the walls and the bright neon signs at night. Hong Kong is so unlike Singapore, where everything is so neatly organised. I could go on gushing about the food, too.

Somehow I see myself going back to Hong Kong pretty often.

My Hong Kong photo-set, here.

On Beijing.

Well, the Beijing trip was really more of a cultural and historical immersion into everything Chinese. Plus it was with the extended family, so it was quite a nightmare. Think Home Alone without the kids, further perpetuating the stereotypes of loud, brash Chinese people. To be perfectly honest, the historical information from the tour guide were actually pretty interesting. But she ended up pissing my aunties off when she said extra payments had to be made if we wanted to go shopping at the street market (where all the fake goods were sold) since it was not part of the itinerary and it was company policy. Poor girl.

Anyhow, photos. More on my flickr set.


I haven't found the willingness to update as often as I used to. I supposed it's work. (This I will talk about soon enough.) Soon enough.

*欢迎光临！喜欢可以免费式穿喔！

Walk into any shops in Taipei, and you will be greeted by the sales people's extremely saccharine-soaked, almost to the point of being nasal welcome - 欢迎光临! ('Huaaa-nn Yinng Guuuan-g Lin-nnnnng!') They sounded like they were going to give you a big hug and a lollipop, and you would buy down the entire shop.

It was almost unreal, hearing the fast and furious mandarin (they call it 国语, guo yu) you normally hear on MTV Chinese and Taiwanese variety shows coming live to you. I was compelled to reply in the same accent. My mandarin (we call it 华语, hua yu) isn't that horrible as I like to think it is. It really isn't. I am not your gantang banana. And sometimes I think I can pull off sounding like a Taiwanese. But I was struggling thinking up proper terms, and saying the right words correctly. In Gong-Guan, where we were shopping for shoes, I made a poor salesgirl looked at me in utter confusion when I asked her for directions. Shoes, or 鞋子, is pronounced 'xie zi', not the 'xue zi' I was pronouncing in my entire soon-to-be 21 years.

Really, you have to be able to speak good-enough mandarin to survive well in this city.

The friendliness of the people is hard to hide. They are so eager to help and show you around. People in the service line there put the GEMS campaign here to shame. Maybe it's the accent. You'd melt just listening to them requesting that you wait while they get the right size. Of course nothing is perfect, I do get the occasionally rude salespeople.

Traffic in Taipei on the other hand, is quite a scary affair, though by no means worse than it is in China. Roads here are small and cramped to squeeze in the cars, the buses, vans and oh yes, the scooters. Loads of them damn scooters. Parking is everywhere along the road. And you can't walk down Ximending without looking out for scooters waiting to knock you down, but they won't. You can continue walking because somehow they will maneuvre out to get past you. And traffic goes two way here on one single lane. Yet not once did I witness a road rage or an accident.


SMRT and Singaporeans should learn a thing or two from Taipei. For one, people really stand on one side of the escalator (which is on the right, instead of the left in Singapore - oh wait, people still hog the right side here), and most importantly, people in Taipei really give way to those getting out of the train. Best of all, they queue!

The second day of the trip was coincidentally the Double Tenth Day. We were advised to avoid the city areas, where protests against the President Chen Suei-Bian, or what they called 天下围攻 (tian xia wei gong), were ongoing. We set off early in the morning to travel up north to Danshui, and many Taiwanese citizens were already in full red gear, ready to join the rallies. News reports were highly sensationalized. Instead of focusing on more pragmatic issues that these protests are pressing on the society or the economy, you get a more tabloid idea of what's happening.


From politics to pop culture, Taipei is the undisputed land of Mandopop. It's hard to avoid hearing the latest songs or music videos, and everywhere you turn, there are definitely posters and billboards of the most popular superstars, plugging the latest products from tea to thumb drives. Take a seat with the old folks talking politics at the Ximending's KFC outlet that provides the best view of Taiwan's youth haven - preferably after 11am on weekdays, the students come in drives, their eccentric fashion sense embedded even in their school uniform.

Taiwan may be a nation denied politically by many, but one cannot deny the influence it has on popular culture in Asia. Taipei's hip quotient is evident in its fashion. Strategically located, they carry the latest in Korean, Japanese and Hong Kong fashion, and thus become one of its own. They are lucky enough to have the four seasons, unlike in Singapore where it's summer all year round. Shopping is insane here, especially now that they are clearing stocks from their fall/autumn collection to make way for winter. Things are almost dirt cheap. Check out Net, a fashion outlet that imitates Gap, Zara and Abercrombie and Fitch but with names like Back To School, Net Men, Net Jeans, etc. I was momentarily insane.

Who can forget the delicacies of Taipei? Must-try include their chicken cutlet, mee sua, the insanely large cups of bubble tea (with the cutest pearls), smelly tofu (try for the fun of it, but good gracious, it really stinks.) and my favourite, shaved ice!


I think there are no desserts in Singapore that can satisfy me anymore. Because I will have one taste of it and compare it to the ones I had in Taipei. Ice Kachang is just boring.

Check out my Taipei Flickr set for more photos!



(*Welcome! You can try it if you like!)

Ye Shanghai.

All the spitting in China I had heard about was true after all; from the moment I stepped out of the airport to the day I boarded the plane back home, the euphoric sounds of spitting could be heard every five minutes. Dolby surround, no less.

All rumours about the toilets in China, on the other hand, were so 1999. There were cleaners who mopped the grounds you walked on. The cubicles came with toilet papers folded very nicely for your convenience. I only came across one toilet throughout the entire journey that had the legendary long-gang in its cubicles I had heard all about, and it was exactly what I had imagined.

My maiden trip to China was of course, essentially Singaporean, since I went with a tour group. It was ridden with complaints (about the food that was so oily you could fly an airplane with it) , shopping (the renmingbi was a test to taunt my horrible maths, things are so dirt-cheap-you-want-to-cry nonetheless.) and more complaints (about the toilets, they are never good enough for these people; and everything else). There was little interest about the history, we just wanted a place to escape the jittering cold. Speaking of cold, it was practically freezing. Still, Summer Singapore isn't exactly Fun Forever, a little winter would have been nice. Perhaps then people here would be nicer and less complain-y. And that also means there are other wardrobe permutations other than tees and jeans, tees and berms and tees and shorts.

Shanghai is China's ultimate urban metropolis. It is lego-ed with tall modern buildings that juxaposed with the Old Shanghai charm of quaint architectures and surrounded by stories of highways that a neverending flow of traffic zoomed by. Traffic in China is a scary affair. Do not forget they have millions of bicycles that jostle for space on the road. They seem to be lacking in a congenital chip that tells them to 'give way', and the indifference is astonishing. No one curses, or make a big hoo-ha, they just move on after all that loud honking. It was simply amazing that I didn't witness a single accident I thought I would.


In Shanghai, you see the glamourously rich and the dangerously poor. (the PETA spirit in me was hoping the fur were faux. And dog meat is a winter delicacy in China. Pamela Anderson should visit China soon.) At one corner you see the one with the faux (I'm deep in consolation) fur bargaining in crisp Shanghainese at the flea market.

You will also see the poor in every corner of the street asking for loose change, or selling faux fur.

Check out my Shanghai Flickr set for more photos.